These hardware offerings, which are critical to IoT operability, are customized and specifically designed for collecting data in verticals like the retail and manufacturing markets. While traditional hardware vendors like Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and ARM are offering products in the CPU and gateway arena, other new vendors are emerging with specific hardware-based solutions in various verticals. And at the center of this entire ecosystem is the channel, which is integrating the hardware into the rest of the IoT solution.

Following are 15 companies with the coolest IoT back-end hardware solutions.